Quote:
Originally Posted by Werner Klopek
Not sure if trolling or serious, if it's the latter please save the pilpul for someone else, im immunized.
Definitely not trolling and I have a pretty decent understanding of race as a biological concept.
It basically goes: Genus > Species > Subspecies/Race, where race and subspecies are basically used interchangeably.
But these are human-imposed-categories (relating to gene flow) that we apply to nature. In the wild, it can be impossible to determine even where species begin and end (c.f. Dark-eyed Juncos), let alone subspecies or beyond.
What is considered a species is a group of organisms that can breed and produce fertile offspring and who do so naturally in the wild. Lions and Tigers can mate and produce ligers, but this only occurs in captivity and not in the wild. Thus we consider Lions and Tigers to be separate species.
Somewhat similarly, there is interbreeding that takes places between Black-capped chickadees and Carolina chickadees, and there is a band of hybridization that is about 50 kilometers wide where their ranges meet. Offspring though do not have success in breeding, and thus differentiation between the two species is maintained and we consider them as separate species.
With other birds like
Song sparrows, ornithologists have documented some 29 subspecies-- but what separates them is not through selective breeding preferences, but through what is known as
clinal variation, where there is gradation of traits across geographical ranges. Skin color in humans is (for the most part) like this with darker skinned people occurring near the tropics, and lighter skinned people occurring in more extreme latitudes.
But in humans as in Song sparrows, these categories are artificially imposed. We see phenotype differences and say "that is a race", but if you were to line up specimens of a bunch of different Song sparrows, it would be impossible to tell where one subspecies begins and another one ends. Sadly I can't find the image that I've seen that illustrates that.
Ultimately race as a biological concept is a product of time and geographic isolation/clinal variation, but it's a messy one, and doesn't have a lot of meaning. That differences within a species exist across different regions is completely expected, but when we talk about race that's all we're really describing.
Last edited by Luckbox Inc; 09-02-2021 at 07:07 PM.